Western Pacific Stock Assessment Review (WPSAR)

PIFSC WPSAR Coordinator

About WPSAR

Section 301(a)(2) of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act (MSA) requires that fishery conservation and
management measures shall be based upon the best scientific information available. MSA § 302(g)(1)(E) provides that the Secretary
of Commerce (Secretary) and each regional fishery management council "may establish a peer review process for that Council for
scientific information used to advise the Council about the conservation and management of a fishery." Consistent with this provision,
the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council (Council), NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) Pacific Islands
Fisheries Science Center (PIFSC) and the Pacific Islands Regional Office (PIRO) have established the Western Pacific Stock Assessment
Review (WPSAR) framework. WPSAR is a cooperative effort to improve the quality, timeliness, objectivity, and integrity of stock
assessments and other scientific information used in managing fishery resources in the Pacific Islands Region. The WPSAR framework may
be applied to scientific information used by the Council directly to fulfill its management mandate in the execution of the MSA. This
framework was drafted to codify the scope of WPSAR, define roles and responsibilities, summarize review scope, and describe the
sequencing and timing of the WPSAR framework in coordination with the larger Council process.

While the WPSAR framework focuses on evaluating stock assessments for management, the goal of the assessments themselves is to examine
the effects of fishing and other factors to describe the past and current status of a fish stock, answer questions about the size or
abundance of a fish stock, and make predictions about how a fish stock will respond to current and future management measures. Prior to
its acceptability for management use, these complex bodies of work are reviewed within two broad categories: benchmark and update.

Benchmark assessments are usually characterized as a new assessment designed for management use. A benchmark encompasses any changes in
an assessment beyond simply the addition of recent new years of data. It may apply a model different from those used in prior
assessments; use new or additional data sources or model parameters; use new analyses; or be the first assessment of a stock for
management.

Assessment updates are restricted to the incorporation of additional years of source data only (such as catch-per-unit-effort (CPUE) or
other data from fishery-dependent or independent surveys) into the time series from a previously reviewed assessment. No additional
changes to the model will be applied nor any changes in the treatment of the data, including survey (CPUE or other) time series.

The WPSAR framework was codified in 2015 and modified in 2016. Under the 2015 WPSAR Framework, reviews conducted by the Center for
Independent Experts (CIE) were included but the 2016 modifications removed that type of review. All reviews that occurred under any
version of WPSAR are available here. For more information about NMFS CIE reviews please go here
(https://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/science-quality-assurance/cie-peer-reviews/index)